Nature has developed mechanisms to protect living organisms against external intruders such as viruses, or internal dysfunction leading to diseases, such as cancer. One such security mechanism is gene silencing, which is at the heart of organisms
We aim to put these new powerful tools in the hands of the experimentalists, since rapidly and reliably producing RNA structures will yield immense benefits to the biomedical field's ability to understand and experiment with these recently discovered gene-silencing pathways.

Public Health Relevance

Accumulating evidence shows that RNA molecules are crucial players in the mechanisms that protect us against external intruders such as viruses, or internal dysfunction that leads to diseases. Determining RNA three-dimensional (3D) structures is key to study RNA function, but is costly and laborious using physical methods. In many ways, this situation hinders the RNA biomedical field, and the research here aims at providing to all computational tools to rapidly and reliably producing RNA 3D structures, yielding immense benefits to the researchers'ability to understand and manipulate RNAs including those in our own protection mechanisms.